By Tycho from Penny Arcade:I never really understood what the point of putting Bing on the Xbox was, other than the fact that they have a Bing and they want you to Bing stuff. I avoided it because I felt it was manipulative, like introducing me to your “cute cousin” who is “really cool” and who you think I “might have a lot in common with” who only uses “meth” “occasionally.” It’s presumptive. But the rest of their “experience” is so deep in the usability weeds right now that Global Search is the only way to pan shit out. I’ll never see more than a single panel of their new Election Coverage for example, because I have ways to cull out their messaging almost in its entirety. Well, except for the “Use Bing” message, which I’ve apparently absorbed in toto. Hmm.

Broader cultural presence is the sort of “mission creep” that people have complained about for years, but that mission done crept; and it’s an aggregated good in my case, because every member of my family uses the Xbox now on essentially a daily basis. Brenna does not like games generally, she thinks they are not a good time investment absent some fitness purpose, but her comfort level with the device is such that she’ll actively seek those things out for herself. This is a profound development, and makes their largely aspirational “whole family fun” vibration seem tethered to reality in some way. < article continued at Penny Arcade >

By Tycho from Penny Arcade:Doing things “together” is more or less our thing, here, Gabriel and I. Now, I had to horn in at the very beginning, but that’s only because I could see very plainly that uploading jpegs to the Internet was a compelling, unassailable business model. I did not actually see that. But we rarely branch out individually, because most of our “urges” can be satisfied within the bonds of our bizarre matrimony. He does the occasional piece, I write the occasional song, or videogame or whatever, but ultimately each day has a set amount of hours. I think I could accomplish a lot in a universe with altered constraints. We don’t have secrets in the traditional sense, things the other person might want or need to know but must be withheld for some reason, so when he started walking around with a literal book of secrets it was completely alien. I didn’t know how to contextualize it, so I didn’t. It was around this time that he made it very clear that it was full of secrets, speaking loudly about it to Kara on the phone, which spurred an ancient modus of seeking and acquisition deep within my animal self. I hadn’t been aware that it was a specific policy of exclusion! Now I was striking him with PVC rods on his bare feet. He takes the book with him to the bathroom, now. I grabbed it once, but he still remembers enough T’ai chi ch’uan to grip and seize. < article continued at Penny Arcade >

I’ve got some really important news to share with you about the show this year:

-We’re no longer handing out swag bags in the morning. At PAX East it caused a major traffic bottleneck and safety issue - we couldn’t give out bags at the same pace that people were coming in. So now, swag bags will be done buffet style in the Queue room AFTER 11:30 AM each day.

-Registration is at the Grand Hyatt Hotel this year. That’s on Pine and 7th.

-The Main Theatre is at the Paramount again. This is an incredible theatre and I’m really glad to have it again this year.

-If you can’t make it to PAX you can catch some of it online. Streaming of selected content will be found on paxsite.com

By Tycho from Penny Arcade:As suggested previously, I backed some hot sauce on Kickstarter which I understood was bizarre even as I was doing it and I await these “fluids” with an admixture of curiosity and terror. I love turn based tactics “experiences,” whether they take place in the confines of an LCD or with handfuls of metal and plastic, but I will absolutely admit to being obsessed at this particular moment with the travails of tiny men. We’ve been playing our Warmachine tournaments with a “shot clock,” which (combined with the inescapable physicality of movement and resolution) runs an electric finger up your exposed spinal column. Until this year, I’ve never attended a single event at San Diego Comic Con that wasn’t related to Penny Arcade in some way. After something like a fucking decade, I tracked down the tabletop room and sunk myself into a game called Malifaux that initially made no sense but, by the time I’d completed my first game, my animated doll-witch and her frost fiends had managed to defeat the samurai cowgirl(???). It was completely diceless, which given my predilection specifically toward dice, worried me. I’ve played games with diceless resolution systems before, but they tend toward the storytelling end of the spectrum. In this case, something like a modified poker deck manages the numbers with solid theme and aplomb. It reminded me of something I’d heard about at PAX East, Relic Knights, which is currently being started via Kick. Their anime/pin-up vibe might not turn your crank, depending on the faction; systemically, though, buying attacks for models with their deck-based mana equivalent and tying draw to their actions got me cranked up. < article continued at Penny Arcade >

Also, I picked up a new 3DS Xl this weekend and it’s pretty cool. The larger screen is great and it’s a nice piece of hardware. I’m curious though, am I the only one who finds it harder to get into the perfect 3D viewing position? It seems to be more difficult to get it right into that sweet spot where there is no headache inducing ghosting. I always seemed to have more trouble than my friends getting the 3DS to look right and the problem seems to be made worse by the larger screen. All the reviews I’ve read say just the opposite though. They say that finding that 3D sweet spot is easier with the XL. I wear glasses for astigmatism and I’ve always wondered if maybe that has something to do with it. Anyone else have this problem?

By Tycho from Penny Arcade:Because “games don’t have good stories,” a good story can be right in front of us and we won’t see it. Or the game can be showing us something else, and it will move quickly, and we will become confused; in the face of these quick movings, our leftover rodent wetware isn’t always up to the task. Unless the game is about finding nuts, in which case we excel. 10000000 is the latest game in this genre; test my theory, and find its truth. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and Bayonetta - especially Bayonetta - are both examples of games with intriguing world build and execution that people are incredibly comfortable disregarding. Our own world is super big, and there are a lot of people in it, and there are things also, and many of these things are Not Nuts. We cull things out of our consciousness necessarily, because madness is the alternative. This mechanism is our servant, though, and we must occasionally verify that we are being well served. There are parts of Darksiders II, as I’ve suggested, that are “cool” cool as opposed to merely “bitchin’.” It also has an undead king armored in bones called the Bonelord. But he’s well written, and well acted. But he’s still the Bonelord! Right? Van art. In toto, based on your own approach - how you’ve set your aperture - it’s a game that manages to possess and eat its own cake simultaneously. The first two games take place at the same time, and if we’re blessed with another one, perhaps it will also. The opportunity to put a bow on the series when they’re at their most experienced - to tell the “real” story they’ve revealed in parts - would be a hell of a trick. I didn’t mean that to a pun or whatever, but fuck it; we’re doing it live. < article continued at Penny Arcade >

Team Fortress 2 is the first game I install on a new machine, because I love the way it looks; it is also the first game I uninstall because I uninstall it immediately. Love for Team Fortress 2 is so universal that people generally assume I’m “trollin’” when I say so, but I might actually hate it. Nothing that happens in that game ever made sense. To me, obviously; please assume that when I say something I’m speaking from my own perspective. I once described it as twenty-four croquet balls banging around in a dryer, and that’s exactly how it feels. It’s FPS slapstick and it will not allow me to care about it. < article continued at Penny Arcade >

By Tycho from Penny Arcade:Mike Fehlauher, a man who literally a sword forged to wear at his wedding, stands astride this world and the next. This is an ennobling way to say that he is a huge dork. I called him over the weekend to see if he wanted to press on in our Orcs Must Die 2 campaign, but he didn’t answer because he was drinking in the woods with someone literally dressed as an orc. The whole scenario makes me question his dedication, frankly. But he has a way of describing the kind of fantasy he likes to run at the table, the kind his players savor, and when he allows me to I like to assist him in the embroidery of same. He describes it as “van art” fantasy; that is to say, the kind of fantasy that would look incredibly sweet airbrushed on the side of a van. There are elements of Darksiders 2 (or “II,” which is pronounced “twooooooooo”) that subscribe to this sweet, some might say bitchin’ aesthetic. Death here with the Death Mask covered with Skulls n’ Shit secretes it - this “fluid” crawls languorously from the tap. And then there’s stuff that is decidedly not that, very nearby: architectural feats the mind reads as real, somehow. Mythic iconography taken shape. This game is a book, and Mr. Death Face is the cover; keep the old adage close-by. < article continued at Penny Arcade >

By Gabe from Penny Arcade:Our Kickstarter will be closing here in just about two hours. As I type this we are nearing the $500k level. We’ve managed to raise a half million dollars towards the goal of an ad free Penny Arcade. That’s just incredible and I want to extend a sincere thank you to everyone who pledged. We got very close to all ads removed from the front page of the site. As it stands we’ve raised enough to remove the top banner advertisement next year. We will also be creating a new Automata comic. Tycho will be dressed as the Fruit Fucker at PAX and we will start filming the Strip Search web show this fall!

It doesn’t look like we’ll hit the Lookouts goal. The idea was that if we raised enough money we could replace projects for advertisers with our own stuff. Right now if I’m not drawing Penny Arcade I’m drawing something for an advertiser. That’s why if we do the CTS or Automata, it takes the place of the normal PA comic. We’ve decided that this Daughters of the Eyrewood story is too cool not to make though. So even though we didn’t fund it, we will be producing the Daughters comic and It will take the place of a PA presents project. That means it will be a stand alone project that will run alongside the normal PA comic rather than instead of it.

As for some of the other projects on the list, we will see what we can do. We might be able to get advertisers to pay for some of them. Maybe we can record the DLC podcast from inside the surprisingly spacious trunk of a Chevy Volt?

By Gabe from Penny Arcade:D&D Next is a thing and we sat down with Mike Mearls, Senior Manager of D&D R&D at Wizards of the Coast to talk about it. If that actually sounds interesting to you then you’re in luck, because we recorded the entire thing. You can grab part one right here and part two (which just went up today) right here.

It’s not a game session or anything. It’s honestly just a conversation about what we can expect in D&D Next. I have to admit to being kind of a jerk to Mike in the first episode. I’m just not sure about this new edition and so I gave him a hard time. Mike did a really good job of explaining why I might be interested in a new edition though.

It’s a very honest talk about what D&D Next is and why you should care.

By Tycho from Penny Arcade:Once one o’clock hits, it’s apparent that a malevolent alien race seizes our broadcast infrastructure and attempts to vend a manifestly dangerous suite of products, services, and ideas. There is no other explanation for the wholly xenogenic nature of these communiques. They show us black and white videos of women who cannot open jars without a custom apparatus; men for whom a hammer is an inconceivably complex device. To look at a hammer with confusion is a dead giveaway. It’s a look that says they would be more comfortable “tamping in” a “spar” with a “kineto.”

Except the jerky machine; I would like to make my own jerky, from the meats I already own. I’m uniquely immune to these products otherwise. I am not invested in my husk, so the idea that I should pay someone on television to elevate it somehow is preposterous. This is the cloud of insterstellar junk that happened to congregate around my consciousness; it’s functionally a waste product. I don’t want to improve it, I want it cleaned off. As I have suggested previously, I resent the entire notion of a body as an ante and then raise you a generalized dissatisfaction with physicality itself. I feel like that’s where most of the problems are situated! We gotta get on that. I can’t wait to see how we segregate ourselves when we’re formed of nothing but protons; that’s gonna be rad. < article continued at Penny Arcade >